Legendary local bassist Joe Osborn, whose work has appeared on hundreds of Top 10 and Top 100 singles and albums over the past 50 years, is featured in a documentary on the Wrecking Crew, the West Coast studio unit in which he performed, showing at the Robinson Film Center later this month.

The Wrecking Crew, a documentary by Denny Tedesco, will open April 17 at the Robinson Film Center in downtown Shreveport. The 101-minute work has received acclaim from showings across the nation since February. It officially opened in Los Angeles in late March.

Osborn attended the L.A. opening and will be at the first two Shreveport opening nights as well, and plans to hold an informal question-and-answer session after each, followed by a happy hour upstairs.

"We are really thrilled and honored to have Joe as our host for screenings of The Wrecking Crew," said RFC spokeswoman Meghan Hochstetler. "I've gotten to know him as we've been getting ready for the screenings coming up. He's a delight to know and I'm sure audiences will love him. He's this wealth of musical history, walking around Shreveport. The amount of people he's worked with and albums he's recorded is mind-boggling."

Still, most of his work has been in studios with peers and producers, and getting on stage and being the focus of attention is still a bit daunting to Osborn, who basically is a shy, modest person.

"I've done enough of them now it doesn't make me that nervous," Osborn said. But you never really get over that. In the studio, the red light comes on and you tense up."Osborn said, admitting he still gets a little shy during public appearances. After all, in the studio, he's usually been with peers and producers.

"Denny Tedesco is usually the moderator, but all he does is introduce us," "There will be a little get-together upstairs after the question-and-answer session.

Now 77 years old and originally from the Madison Parish hamlet of Mound, Osborn has long called Northwest Louisiana home and a decade ago moved to Keithville.

His heyday was from the 1960s through the 1980s, when he was in demand as a session bassist, recording for artists ranging from Ricky Nelson and Johnny Rivers to Nancy Sinatra and Neil Diamond.

Perhaps best known to the pop-listing public for his almost magical work on the Fifth Dimension's 1969 anthem Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In and Diamond's Holly Holy, he also performed on Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water album and most of the works of The Mamas and the Papas, The Association, The Grass Roots and the Carpenters, a brother-and-sister duo he discovered and nurtured. Mostly recently, Osborn has been working with local guitar phenomenon Matthew Davidson.

Though he has been semi-retired since 2005, Osborn still records occasionally, and both of his sons, David Osborn and Darren Osborn, have followed him into entertainment through bass playing.

The crack rhythm unit was called in to perform on most recordings by the Beach Boys, as well as works by the Byrds, Glen Campbell, the Partridge Family, Leonard Cohen,, Nat King Cole, Cher and John Denver.

Osborn said he got to know producers, such as Lou Adler and Bones Howe, better than the star performers, who rarely interacted with the musicians.

"There were very few of the artists that we actually got to know," he said. "If they had anything to say to us, they would say it through the producer."

Adler and Howe, he said, were "the kind of people who knew the combinations of musicians to put together in the studio and leave them alone. The music might have been hard and something might have made it difficult, but that part made it easy."

He did know some of the stars personally, including fellow Wrecking Crew members who rose to fame.

"I got to be friends with Glen Campbell, because I knew him way before he ever got anything going," he said. "We were both playing on demos for grocery money. Johnny Rivers was a friend long before either of us ever wound up in L.A. John Phillips and the Mamas and the Papas, I got to know them personally."

He was especially close to Richard and Karen Carpenter, who he got to know after they did some session work for him and he realized their potential.

"I knew their family," he said. "When they came to the studio they were still in high school. Just kids.

"But that wasn't the rule. Especially with someone like Dean Martin, they had nothing to say to the musicians. That was just as well. We didn't want to hear from them, either. We'd rather talk to the producers."

Take part

Joe Osborn will take part in a question-and-answer session following the evening showings of The Wrecking Crew at the Robinson Film Center April 17-18. Showtime is 7:30 p.m. each night. These showings will be followed by a special upstairs happy hour where patrons can talk with Osborn.

Other showings for The Wrecking Crew will be:

April 17: 3 p.m. and 5:15 p.m.

April 18-19: 1 p.m., 3:15 p.m. and 5:30 p.m.

April 21-23: 5:15 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.

Tickets are $9.50 for the general public and $7.50 for RFC members.

The Robinson Film Center is at 617 Texas St., Shreveport. To reserve tickets or get more information, call (318) 459-4122 or visit the RFC website at http://www.robinsonfilmcenter.org/. Box office hours are 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Tuesday-Sunday. It is closed Mondays.